No. 249

Cream of Barley, Vienna Style, or of Rice a la Cremieux

Creme d'Orge a la Viennoise, ou de Riz a la Cremieux

Put into a saucepan two ounces of butter, and when very hot, add four ounces of well cleaned pearl barley; heat it, then moisten with four quarts of broth; cover the saucepan, and cook the barley slowly for three hours, or more, until it yields easily to the pressure of the finger, then drain and pound in a mortar, diluting it with its own stock, afterward straining through a sieve or tammy. Return it to the fire, and in case it should be too thick add more of the broth; stir continually with a spatula, bearing on to the bottom of the saucepan, until the soup is ready to boil; season with salt, sugar and nutmeg, and add the thickening to the soup, stirring it in well until all the butter is melted (No. 175).

For Cream of Rice a la Cremieux.-Pound or mash well in a mortar, half a pound of fresh bread-crumbs, mixing in gradually two whole eggs, and the third of its quantity of fine butter; form this into small, round cakes, seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and one-eighth of an inch thick; bake them in a hot oven, and serve the same time as the soup. The cream of rice is prepared exactly the same way as the barley, the only difference being that this requires less cooking than the barley.

← No. 248 Cream of Asparagus with Croutons Souffles or Soups & Broths No. 250 Cream of Brussels Sprouts →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cream soups are built on the same skeleton: grain simmered to collapse in broth, pounded, strained, then finished with a liaison. Two things decide whether it works — the straining and the temperature after the liaison goes in.

The hinge: never boil after the thickeningThe "thickening (No. 175)" is Ranhofer's liaison; the instruction to stir "until all the butter is melted" shows it carries butter, and his cream-soup liaisons are generally egg-yolk-and-cream based. Add it off direct heat and keep the soup below a simmer, stirring until the butter melts; boiling curdles the yolks and turns the soup grainy.
Mortar and tammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people in a professional kitchen. A blender or food mill does the pounding, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve or chinois — barley leaves fibrous fragments a blender will not fully break down.
Scale and yieldFour ounces of pearl barley to four quarts of broth sounds absurdly thin: the barley is cooked covered for three hours, then drained, pounded and diluted with its own stock, and the recipe assumes you will add more broth at the end if it is still too thick. Halving it is straightforward.
Pearl barley todayModern pearl barley is generally more thoroughly polished than the nineteenth-century product and will usually soften in 45 to 60 minutes rather than three hours. Cook it until it crushes with no resistance at all — the finger test in the original is the real instruction, not the clock.
The rice versionUse a starchy round or medium-grain white rice, not parboiled or long-grain. It will be fully collapsed in 25 to 35 minutes. Everything else, including the liaison and the seasoning, is unchanged.
Salt, sugar and nutmegRanhofer gives no quantities; the sugar is presumably a pinch for seasoning rather than to sweeten. Nutmeg should be grated fresh and used lightly.
The little bread cakesRanhofer says only "a hot oven"; treat that as roughly 425–450F. Half a pound of fresh crumbs, two eggs and about two and two-thirds ounces of butter (a third of the crumbs' weight) makes a stiff paste; the wafers are small, 7/8 inch across and 1/8 inch thick, and colour fast, so watch them. Bake them the same day and serve them alongside, not floating in the bowl.
Broth qualityWith so little grain, the broth is the soup. A light veal or chicken stock, unsalted so you can season at the end, keeps the colour pale; a dark or heavily reduced stock will overwhelm the barley.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its soup chapter is essentially a French professional repertoire filed under French names, with a garnish or a seasoning to justify each title. Here the "Viennoise" label appears to rest on the sugar and nutmeg — a sweet-spiced treatment of a grain soup that reads as Central European rather than Parisian, and barley soup was and remains a staple of Austrian and Bohemian cooking. The alternative name, à la Crémieux, follows the nineteenth-century habit of dedicating dishes to public figures, though the person intended is not identified and Ranhofer himself never explains his dedications. What the recipe really shows is how a grand restaurant kitchen turned four ounces of barley into four quarts of soup: labour, in the form of long slow cooking, pounding in a mortar and forcing through a cloth, stood in for expensive ingredients, and the cost of the dish lay almost entirely in the stock and the final liaison.